Overall responsibilities - The Clerk to the Council/Town Clerk will be the Proper Officer of the Council and as such is under a statutory duty to carry out all the functions, and in particular to serve or issue all the notifications required by law of a local authority's Proper Officer.
Specific responsibilities:
- to ensure that statutory or other provisions affecting the running of the council are observed
- to prepare, in consultation with appropriate members, agendas for meetings of the council and committees, to attend such meetings and prepare minutes for approval
- to attend all meetings of the council and all meetings of its committees and sub committees
Thus it may be seen that, despite what a self aggrandised clerk may consider their role to be, any supplementary function is in addition rather than as opposed to, the core function as 'should' be laid out similar to the NALC model contract.
Firstly, it is surprising to hear that a 'small parish' would have a clerk and a deputy clerk role since most would be a single part time flexi hours situation. Second it is even more surprising to hear that between the 2 of them they are unable to arrange their Flexi hours to ensure cover for the fundamental role of being available for a council meeting.
So the issue seems to be compounded at several levels.
Neither of the 2 staff appear, from the OP, to be able to fulfil their core function.
2 staff seems excessive - are they both part time?
They are unable through regular sickness or poorly planned absence to coordinate essential cover within a flexi time contract which should ensure availability for core functions.
If they cannot manage themselves to deliver core output, is the council deficient in managing them?
"More experienced councillors" is an often misused term which frequently translates to "those that have been there longer."
'Time served' is a very poor measure of 'experience.' 'Experience' is born from meaningful exposure to challenging and changing scenarios where knowledge is gained through adaptive behaviour. 'Time served', in isolation, more often results in a stovepiped mentality of entrenched resistance to change leading to habitually poor outcomes.
Any person appointed by the council may record and present draft minutes (on a single or multiple occasions) of a council meeting. The purpose of the clerk and proper officer is to advise on the lawfulness of council actions.
It very much sounds like you have members within your council that dance to what ever tune the employees' whistle and that their 'experience' would more accurately be described as 'habits' and bad ones at that.